"How's that beautiful dancer boy?" Hudson asks, hanging in a forward bend. "The one who was Asian."

"Oh, God, he went to Australia," Leitner replies.

"He was sooooo beautiful. So cute."

"I know, isn't he?"

"Didn't he date that guy?"

"No, he's straight."

"What?! He's straight?! Why didn't you tell me?"

"I didn't know what to do."

"Oh my gawd!" Hudson yelps, nearly collapsing in giggles.

On the way to the dance studio, Hudson had ogled the valet, a muscled hunk in a pink polo shirt, as she pulled out of the driveway of the Beverly Hills Hotel. ("So hot!") She always ends up falling for the funny guys, she explains, absentmindedly navigating her messy Prius, but this does not detract from her long-standing appreciation for the eye-candy types. Ever since high school, she admits, she's been a little boy crazy. (And with Hudson, they are "boys," not men.) "When I was a teenager, like, when I turned 16, I loved boys," she says. "That was just my thing. My mom was like, `Oh boy, she loves boys!' I always loved boys. I still love boys. First of all, I always had a boyfriend. This is the first time I've been single since I was 16!" One of Hudson's favorite workout routines, perhaps not surprisingly, is inspired by pole-dancing.

It's a frisky moment for Hudson, whose divorce from Black Crowes front man Chris Robinson—with whom she has a fiveyear- old son, Ryder—became final exactly a year and two days before we meet, not to mention just as Hudson, 29, was entering what is supposed to be a woman's sexual prime. Hudson's seductive charms have led her into romances with Dax Shepard, Lance Armstrong, and, most publicly, Owen Wilson, whose suicide attempt occurred last year after their roughly yearlong relationship fizzled. (They briefly got back together about nine months
later.) She is fond of saying, "I love being in love." (A few weekends after our interview, the tabloids are abuzz with rumors of Hudson doing some serious flirting with actor Jason Statham, and, according to Perez Hilton, getting "friendly" with a female model.) Hudson says that being single is "fantastic." I ask her if she's made a conscious decision to take some time for herself. "Yeah," she says. "But I don't know how long it's going to last!"

Hudson knows how to have fun: Anne Hathaway, with whom she stars in Bride Wars, a romantic comedy about two lifelong best friends who accidentally book the same date for their weddings at the Plaza, reports that Hudson spearheaded tequila toasts for the crew; at Christmas each year, she gets together with a group of girlfriends for a Secret Santa exchange, for which, Hudson says, "Kiki de Montparnasse"—the purveyor of racy lingerie—"seems to be the place we like to go." In high school, recalls Jennifer Meyer, the jewelry designer and wife of Tobey Maguire, Hudson got sent home for wearing her skirts too short.

Despite her flirtatiousness, Hudson is willing to let a serious relationship happen when it will. "I always wondered about girls who like dating, and hooking up, and are like, `Do you have anybody? Set me up with somebody!' " she says. "See, I'm so not into that. Not my thing." She does, however, occasionally succumb to a blind date, to no less mortifying results than the rest of the world's romantic-comedy-going population. (Consider it R&D.) "I've been on so many bad dates," Hudson says. "I went on one where I just left because he was so boring. I felt really bad, and I didn't want him to pay for dinner. It's like, `It's really nice to meet you'—moving on! Then you call your friend and you're like, `Really? Really? Is that who you think I would have a great night with?!' "

Hudson continues: "[Being a mother] makes you really realize fast if it's going to be the right thing or not. You know, it's a more adult-type situation. Which is kind of nice, because you get to bypass the part that might get you into trouble. The part that you might inevitably look back at and go, Why did I have blinders on?"

As much as romantic matters may occasionally make Hudson question her judgment, domestic ones do not. Later in the day, she is in the kitchen of her house, in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles. "They're so good," she decrees, dipping a pinkie into a twice-baked sweet potato. "But they might be a little too sophisticated for kids. You know what I would do? Orange juice, a bit of butter, and then some nutmeg."

"One question for you," a woman wearing an apron replies. "The frisée salad—I have pancetta; I was thinking of putting pears and some pecans?"

"Um, okay," Hudson says.

"What did you have in mind?" the cook asks.

"I wanted more like a frisée with a real vinaigrette. Traditional French bistro style," Hudson says. "There's a good one in the latest Bon Appétit."

Kate Hudson, a recipe-quoting, periodical-filing homebody, dispatching domestic orders under a bower of gleaming copper pots? A visitor wonders, for a moment, if she's stumbled into the immaculate yet warm kitchen of the wrong young, attractive, personal-safety-threateningly popular movie actress. In the taxonomy of Hollywood starlets, Hudson is usually assigned the role of girl next door or lovable flake, but here she is, directing the day's preparations for a kids-and-parents Halloween party with a crisp attention to detail to rival Martha Stewart's. A Hudson paradox is starting to emerge. She checks, or has checked, the box for every tabloid label—Hollywood royalty, rock 'n' roll (ex-)wife, single mother, twentysomething divorcée—and somehow manages to transcend being confined by any of them. A hippie chick with a traditional streak, an earth mother with a prematernal body, a career girl who obsesses over salad greens, Hudson, through some quantum feat of personality, is greater than the sum of her ever-conflicting parts.

The Hudson house has a basketball hoop in the driveway, a big front yard, and, in the living room, three large screens that serve as security monitors. The place, which she and Robinson bought in 2003, at one point belonged to Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell, Hudson's mother and stepfather. (Well, not technically, as Russell and Hawn famously aren't married, but have been together for 26 years.) In other words, Hudson lives in her childhood home. Her nostalgia for the tight-knit days of her upbringing is such that she employs her old nanny to manage her house and
occasionally look after her "babyman."

For all her perma-adolescent insouciance—"We were like, `Whatever, man,' " she tells me, of planning her wedding—Hudson is a fierce mama-bear. Earlier, over breakfast at the Beverly Hills Hotel, I asked her what makes her angry. The answer, a long and impassioned one, is the paparazzi: "They've become an entity to themselves. But eventually they'll implode. They're creating a house of cards that will inevitably fall." My tape recorder whirs for minutes as Hudson reaches a vehement crescendo. "These are not nice people," she says. "When you're taking your child to school, and they're trying to get on school property to get a picture, it literally makes you want to just smack them."

Meyer, who has known Hudson since childhood (her dad was Goldie Hawn's agent), calls her a "complete caretaker" and a ferociously protective, and opinionated, friend. "Something that Kate is very verbal about with her friends is that she thinks they really need to be in positive, loving relationships and situations. That means friendships, too. If Kate is upset about something, she vocalizes it in two seconds," Meyer says. "She'll leave a message like, `Hey, you haven't called me, and there's something wrong, and I've got a meeting in 20 minutes, and you have 20 minutes to call me. Let's deal with this.' "

Hathaway calls Hudson a "savvy bohemian" and a "generous alpha female." (I, apparently, am not the only one who finds defining Hudson an oxymoronic proposition.) "There is not a shy bone in that girl's body," Leitner, Hudson's dance teacher, says.

In addition to playing Liv, a hard-charging New York City lawyer in Bride Wars, Hudson coproduced the film. "No matter what people like to say, it's very hard to get female-driven movies made," she says. But, lest one interpret this as a declaration of feminist economic empowerment, the source of Hudson's girl power is strictly pragmatic. "It's not even, like, feminist so much as it's hard to get boys into the theater. It's a business. That's just the way it is, unfortunately for us ladies. So what you need is a high concept, a movie that women want to see that men don't feel like you're twisting their arm to see." Whether a movie about dueling Bridezillas qualifies as high-concept is debatable, but few men need much persuasion to spend a few hours in Hudson's company.

As much as Hudson's natural gifts, both physical (her smile, the one where she looks as though she just swallowed the best piece of chocolate in the world) and comedic ("She's a girl who knows where the jokes are," Hathaway says of Hudson's Goldie-like timing), distinguish her on-screen, as does her willingness to focus on, and obsess over, the minutest details. Bride Wars director Gary Winick says, "I'd never been in a situation where the actress is also the producer, so basically I had to think, Does that mean I'm not going to be able to make the movie I want to make? She's really
respectful of that, but she's also really firm. She's like, right in your face, saying, `This is how I think it should go.' "

Hudson's big break, now immortalized in awards-ceremony history, came when Cameron Crowe cast her as the wacky groupie Penny Lane in Almost Famous, a role for which Hudson was Oscar nominated and received a Golden Globe for best supporting actress. In short order came a string of effervescent romantic comedies (Alex & Emma; You, Me, and Dupree; My Best Friend's Girl ), the most memorable of which—the great How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days made nearly $200 million worldwide—pitted her against Matthew McConaughey in breezy, nubile battles of lust and will. Hudson can be defensive at the suggestion that she lacks range. Even in the midst of filming Le Divorce, a Merchant Ivory adaptation of the Diane Johnson novel about Americans in Paris, or The Skeleton Key, a horror movie, she says, "I could be in an interview and people would keep going, `So why do you always do romantic comedies?' " Still, Hudson plans to diversify. "Do I want to do darker roles? Of course," she says. "It has to be the right thing, though. I'm not just going to, like, make a movie that's, Oh, she's a whore, prostitute, and heroin addict."

CHECK OUT THE FEBRUARY ISSUE OF ELLE FOR THE FULL STORY ON KATE HUDSON